Preet Bharara Is Now in the Trump-Opposition Business

A little after noon on September 25, in a recording studio high above Hell’s Kitchen, Preet Bharara was ready for his weekly interrogation. “The first one is a tweet, from @OpenMindedBunny,” said Bharara, sitting bolt upright in a blue open-necked shirt before a hanging microphone and letting out a stagy guffaw. “I’ll definitely have to follow that person! @OpenMindedBunny asks, ‘How much longer do we have to wait for special counsel Mueller’s investigation? This is like waiting for Christmas as a kid.’ ” Not so long ago, as the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Bharara was the one asking questions — and frequently dragging wrongdoing into the open. He used to joke about how much he loved his subpoena power and now jokes about how painfully he misses it. Earlier this year, under circumstances that are still somewhat mysterious, Bharara was fired by President Donald Trump. Upon his ouster, he was hoisted up as a hero by the anti-Trump resistance, part of a growing fraternity of law­enforcement officials who have lost their jobs because, it is at least suspected, the president fears probes into his advisers, his businesses, Russian election interference, and a potentially illegal cover-up. When Bharara exited, Robert Mueller reportedly took over some lines of investigation initiated during Bharara’s tenure as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, including ones involving Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort. He is also a friend and former colleague of James Comey’s, the deposed FBI director. He knows stuff, in other words.

Bharara often says that there are three political parties in America: Democratic, Republican, and federal prosecutor. The first two are in disarray, but the prosecutors still stand as a serious threat to the president. Many of Trump’s opponents believe that the fate of his administration — and maybe even the nation itself — will be determined by Mueller’s investigation, but its workings are far from transparent. That is why Bharara believes he has a role to play from the sidelines, as an interpreter. His new podcast, Stay Tuned With Preet, means to inform listeners about the law — and particularly how it might ultimately be enforced against Trump. The chipper-sounding title has an intimidating backstory. When he was a U.S. Attorney pursuing criminal gangs, inside-trading rings, and corrupt political conspiracies, he would often tell the press “Stay tuned” to foreshadow indictments to come.

“I want to make one thing clear,” he said in response to @OpenMindedBunny’s timetable question. “It is impossible for us on the outside to know, and it should be impossible for us on the outside to know, because it’s a secret investigation and sometimes it takes a long time.”

He went on, “It’s frustrating. But that’s the way it has to be.”

Inside the recording booth, Max Linsky, the producer Bharara hired to make the podcast, tried to prod the host forward in a more speculative direction.

“If you could say, like, ‘That said …’ ”

“I got it,” Bharara replied. “So, that said, with respect to how careful they have to be, all investigations have a certain kind of momentum.” He alluded to the previous week’s front-page stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times, which described the early-morning search of Manafort’s house and other bracing developments. “The cloud either descends in a firestorm,” Bharara concluded, “or it’s dissipated.” Bharara didn’t mention that his office had started that investigation into Manafort’s financial dealings, or that the prosecutor reportedly handling that case has gone to work for Mueller.

Circumspection is an unusual quality to find in a talk-show host, and Bharara is still trying to figure out how to converse with his audience. Even some friends were surprised when, after his firing, Bharara chose to forgo the traditional career paths for a successful former U.S. Attorney — a run for public office or a lucrative payday in private practice — in favor of a more unorthodox course. Earlier this year, Bharara joined Some Spider Studios, a digital start-up run by his brother, Vinit, a wealthy technology entrepreneur most famous for co-founding the Amazon competitor turned Amazon takeover target diapers.com, who is now intent on figuring out how to capitalize on the vehement opposition to Trump. “I want to build around his brand,” Vinit said, “and his ability to get these young people activated.” The plan for Some Spider calls for creating videos, a ted-like conference business, and custom content for advertisers. Vinit says he aims to build the “next-gen Viacom.”

The Bharara brothers, like most everyone else in media, have witnessed the astonishing appetite for news and invective about Trump, and the success of shows like Pod Save America, which stars a quartet of former Obama aides. Bharara’s show features insidery conversations with guests who worked at the highest levels of national security and law enforcement, like Lisa Monaco, a former deputy to Mueller when he was FBI director. His ruminative chats play out like therapy sessions for the shadow government. The Bharara brothers figured that Preet’s tangle with Trump — along with his long-standing reputation as a hard-driving, headline-cultivating prosecutor — bequeathed him a large and potentially valuable following. It appears they were right. Upon its premiere, his series, which was launched in partnership with WNYC Studios, immediately shot to the top of Apple’s podcast rankings.

“We’re in such an incredible, unprecedented, zero-context moment, and it just doesn’t feel like there are that many people in the world who actually have a sense of what’s going on,” says Linsky, whose Pineapple Street Media worked on Hillary Clinton’s series With Her (he co-hosted) and is now collaborating on Bharara’s show. “Let’s hear from this person who actually does have a sense of that — one of the handful of people who have been in the room. I mean, really been in the room.”

Preet Bharara
Photo: Joao Canziani

As U.S. Attorney, Bharara was often said to be “press friendly,” but he could be better described as media-curious. He often talked about the vital role of investigative reporting, and in private conversations with journalists, would express a more-than-casual interest in how their industry operated. It is possible to look at his recent actions — speaking out against Trump, forgoing a rainmaker’s payday for a visible, uncompromised role in media — as strategic positioning for a future political race, and maybe that’s what they are. But there is also a simpler, familial explanation. “One dimension of what I wanted to do is to have a public voice,” Bharara told me. “And it occurred to me that if I was going to do it anywhere, why not do it under the auspices of my brother’s media company? Because he benefits, I benefit. You own your own stuff. And I would have a lot of freedom. And I trust him.” When asked about the attraction of his new job, he often quips, “Job security.”

Preet is 48 years old, and his brother is three years younger. Vinit is the richer, ­jauntier Bharara. Someone who is acquainted with both brothers refers to him as “Elvis Preet.” Everyone, including Preet, drops the t at the end of Vinit’s name, so it sounds like he’s just another Vinny from New Jersey. This one, though, sold a diaper company for $545 million — after a ruthless price war, designed to force a sale, that has long been a favorite part of the Jeff Bezos legend — before he started Some Spider Studios. (The name is a reference to Charlotte’s Web.) The brothers share an intense bond and an easy, wisecracking rapport, which they say has existed since childhood.

“They were like this,” their father, Jagdish Bharara, told me one Saturday afternoon while holding up his interlocked fingers. We were sitting at the dining-room table of Vinit’s new apartment, which has a panoramic view of Madison Square Park. Vinit was there, along with his mother, Desh, who served delicious homemade samosas while Vinit’s wife and two children were watching tennis in the living room.

Jagdish was born in Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan, but the sectarian violence that followed independence drove his family to India when he was a boy. He and Desh were matched in an arranged marriage, despite a difference in religion. He is a Sikh, while Desh is a Hindu. ­(Preet’s wife, Dalya, is the child of a Jewish mother and Muslim father; they had three separate wedding ceremonies.) Jagdish became a doctor and moved the family to the U.S. to pursue a fellowship when Preet was a baby. He originally intended to stay just a few years, but he soon found he was unable to imagine returning.

“I always used to say I was not fit to live in India,” Jagdish said. He was morally outraged by corruption and refused to pay bribes. (When Vinit looks at his brother the prosecutor, he said, he thinks: “That’s Dad.”) The family settled near Asbury Park, where Jagdish practiced as a pediatrician. He also co-owned an Indian restaurant for a while, where the boys would often spend their after-school hours, doing homework. Desh was an informal social organizer for the local Indian community, and young Preet would sometimes emcee at events, doing comedy bits that made fun of Indian parents. He was an academic prodigy, a champion in public-speaking competitions, and the kind of kid who would write an eloquent letter to the newspaper India Abroad in defense of the Democratic Party.

“He taught me how to read,” Vinit said. “He was only 8. He always holds that over me.”

“Vinit was interested in sports; Preet tried baseball,” Jagdish said, wrinkling his face at the memory of the experiment. “When the game is on the line, who comes in? Vinit!”

At the end of our visit, Jagdish gave me a folded dot-matrix printout of Preet’s 1986 valedictory address to the small private school he and Vinit both attended. According to family lore, Preet caused a stir by obliquely criticizing a domineering headmaster who had fired a popular teacher, saying, “If we don’t speak up, we are shirking a responsibility to ourselves and to our futures.” Vinit, who was then in ninth grade, still tells the story with awe, remembering that the headmaster stalked out of the graduation ceremony. “I was afraid at the time,” Jagdish said. “He had already been accepted to Harvard.”

Both brothers attended Columbia University’s law school, and Jagdish would joke that he liked the sound of the firm Bharara & Bharara. (By the way, it is pronounced bar-ara, although the family is accustomed to acrobatic mistakes.) But the brothers embarked on divergent paths. Preet went into government, working as a junior prosecutor in the Southern District, where Comey was U.S. Attorney for a portion of his tenure. He then moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as chief counsel to Senator Charles Schumer, who became a mentor and patron. Schumer’s office is a training ground for Democratic talent, and Bharara proved himself by organizing blockbuster hearings into political meddling at the Justice Department during the Bush administration. Comey was his star witness. When Obama won the White House, Schumer engineered Bharara’s appointment as U.S. Attorney.

The Southern District — often called the “Sovereign District” — is renowned for its independence from Washington, its aggressiveness in making cases, and its proximity to Manhattan’s star-making machinery. Past holders of the U.S. Attorney’s office, like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, became famous crime-fighters there, and Bharara followed in their footsteps, mounting a series of high-profile prosecutions against financial criminals, including the hedge-fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam. Time magazine put his face on its cover beneath the headline “This Man Is Busting Wall St.” Other inside-trading targets — most notably Steve Cohen— escaped his grasp or saw their convictions overturned on appeal. But Bharara’s reputation was made. (He is the model for the crusading, press-hungry prosecutor played by Paul Giamatti on Billions.)

Later, Bharara’s work took a more political turn, as he investigated both Democrats and Republicans for corruption. In Albany, it was said that the state government was run by “three men in a room,” and Bharara convicted two of them, legislators Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos. (Both convictions were recently overturned by an appeals court, owing to a Supreme Court decision that narrowed the definition of bribery.) Bharara also probed but did not charge the third man in the room, Governor Andrew Cuomo, over the suspicious disbanding of the anti-graft Moreland Commission. There was talk that he would have been appointed attorney general if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, although some of her loyalists thought he might be too uncontrollable.

All the while, Vinit was making his fortune. During the dot-com boom, he and a friend from childhood, Marc Lore, started a website called thepit.com, where collectors could trade baseball cards like stocks. In 2001, it was purchased by Topps, and Vinit went to work as the card-maker’s general counsel. Two years later, shortly after his honeymoon, Vinit quit. “He calls me and says he’s leaving the job,” Jagdish said. “I said, ‘You’re leaving the job?’ ” He and Lore thought it might be possible to take on Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth, by focusing on a narrow specialization, and they picked diapers. Initially, manufacturers wouldn’t supply them, so they enlisted Jagdish — and, on at least one occasion, Preet, then a powerful Senate staffer — to clear out the diapers aisle at B.J.’s Wholesale Club. He and Lore always believed in the power of short, catchy domain names. After diapers.com developed a customer base, they launched soap.com, wag.com (a pet site), and yoyo.com (toys), before Amazon bought them out.

“What really got me jazzed, coming from diapers.com, was when people would stop me on the street and say, ‘You were the guy who co-founded diapers.com. I love that, I love that brand,’ ” Vinit said. Media, he told me, is one of the “very few industries where you can truly create these brands where you make emotional connections with people at scale.” One day, driving through the Holland Tunnel, Vinit received a call from a web-domain broker, offering cafe.com.

“These are not easy domain names to come across,” Vinit recalled as I was talking to him and his brother at his company’s Flatiron District offices.

“The four-letter nouns are really expensive,” Preet said.

Only after he had purchased the Cafe domain did Vinit begin to think about what to do with it. This was three years ago, during a brief content boom, when BuzzFeed and Upworthy were ascendant and many technology tycoons — Pierre Omidyar, Ev Williams, Bezos himself — were making investments in digital journalism. Vinit initially wanted to create a forum for idealistic writers who were frustrated by the lack of outlets for their work. He told me he wrote up a vision statement for a general-interest site, citing Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Springsteen among his many inspirations. (Preet is an avid Springsteen fan, too.) Cafe was initially filled with long essays by well-paid freelancers. “I had this big, huge, great domain name,” Vinit said, but he soon discovered that wasn’t enough. “We weren’t focusing like a laser, as I should have been, on the audience, and the very specialized nature of that audience.”

Some Spider is a holding company, and Vinit always imagined that Cafe would be the first of many media properties. Coming from retail, Vinit was obsessed with analyzing consumer demand, trying to identify the levers that would lead people to click on content. (Lore, who went on to start the e-commerce site jet.com, which he sold to Walmart, owns a 20 percent stake in Some Spider.) Vinit told me he quickly concluded that Cafe’s audience was responding to parenting themes. So he abandoned his initial concept and acquired Scary Mommy, an irreverent parenting site. In the conference room at Some Spider’s office, next to an early edition of Charlotte’s Web, Vinit proudly displays a piece of Scary Mommy merchandise, a snap-back cap that says VAJAYJAY.

“It all goes back to the brand,” Vinit says. “When I looked at Scary Mommy, I said, I think we can do some damage with that.” Just as Scary Mommy has now positioned itself as the leading media outlet for “millennial moms,” Vinit predicted that Preet would attract an audience of young true believers to Cafe, which since its launch has evolved into a site mainly devoted to political commentary and humor. In addition to producing written posts and podcasts, Cafe is investing in a nascent video operation —headed by Blake Zeff, a journalist and former Schumer aide — that is creating original content to be distributed via Facebook and other digital platforms.

Preet says he always intended to one day go into business with his brother, although his work on Cafe takes up only a portion of his time. Bharara is also on the faculty of NYU’s law school, has a contract to commentate on CNN, and was reportedly paid a seven-figure book advance by Knopf. Still, he says he’s concentrating his attention on the start-up venture. “I think Vinit is very ambitious,” Bharara said. “I’m competitive and ambitious in everything I do also.” And while he’s financially comfortable, Preet still grouses good-naturedly about his status as the poorer Bharara brother. One day, he brought up his stockholding in thepit.com.

“How did that work out for you?” Preet asked sarcastically.

“He came in late,” Vinit explained.

“I did not have the preferred stock, because clearly blood is not thicker than water,” Preet said. “So I didn’t get shit from that thing.”

“He was holding common stock, got paid pennies, but everybody else crushed it,” Vinit said. “Actually, he wound up investing in diapers.com. He did well on that.” (According to a financial disclosure filed with the federal Office of Government Ethics, Preet Bharara realized a profit of between $1 million and $5 million on the Amazon sale.)

“I don’t have any salary here,” Preet said of his media venture. “I have equity here, because I believe in the company, and I don’t want to miss out again.”

Vinit Bharara
Photo: Joao Canziani

Prior to November 8, 2016, Bharara had every reason to believe that he would have the option to remain in his public office, or at least leave it on his own terms. As they watched the early results at their Westchester County home over glasses of wine, Bharara’s wife said, “I think Hillary might lose.”

“I said, ‘Get outta here, it’s gonna be fine,’ ” Bharara recalled.

The next day, Bharara addressed the bleary-eyed staff of the Southern District. Many were shaken by a campaign that featured calls for the losing candidate’s imprisonment. Bharara reassured his prosecutors, stressing the power of the institution and the Constitution. He used his line about the three parties and said that much of their work, especially on criminal cases, was apolitical. He expected that he would be replaced by a Republican appointee, but anticipated an orderly transition.

In the opening segment of his podcast’s premiere episode, Bharara described the strange turn of events that followed. In mid-November, he received surprising news from Schumer, who had talked with Trump. He was summoned to a meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner, where he was asked to remain in his post. At the time, Trump had not even nominated a secretary of State, but he seems to have been trying to win over Schumer. Plus, he told Bharara, he’d seen his great press. Bharara said that at the end of the 15- or 20-minute meeting, he was satisfied that he had received “no indication that anybody was going to be getting in my way.” He emerged from the tower’s golden elevators to tell the waiting press corps that he was staying.

His relationship with Trump soon took an awkward turn. Bharara says the president called him twice before his inauguration, seemingly just to chat. He was unnerved, given the ethical ­complications. “I thought it was not the greatest thing in the world for there to be a direct and casual line of communication between a sitting U.S. Attorney and the future president of the United States,” he said on the podcast. “Particularly given the kinds of jurisdiction I have in Manhattan,” which happens to cover many of Trump’s “business interests and associates.” He called up Jagdish. “His reaction was ‘I don’t like that he is calling you,’ ” Bharara recalled, impersonating his father’s Indian accent. “ ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Then, in March, as the FBI’s scrutiny of Trump and his aides intensified, Trump tried to initiate another phone call with Bharara, which he declined to take, instead reporting the overture to his superiors at the Justice Department.

In one of our conversations, I asked Bharara whether he had ever discovered why Trump had reached out. He has a way of meeting your gaze with one eye widened, like a jeweler scrutinizing a flawed rock. “I have no idea,” Bharara replied. “I don’t know if he was calling me to tell me to shit-can a case …”

He stopped mid-sentence, his face brightening.

“Here’s the boss!”

Into the glass-walled Some Spider conference room walked Vinit. He quickly picked up the drift of the conversation. “Oh, you’re in the story,” he said.

It was over quickly. Soon after Trump’s last call, Bharara was informed that the president had requested the resignations of all the U.S. Attorneys. When Jagdish heard about it on the news, he called up Preet, asking whether the order to resign applied to him, too, because of Trump’s previous assurance. Preet told him he didn’t know. “Then, in the night, he calls me and says ‘No, it applies it to me also,’ ” Jagdish recalled. “I was really taken aback, that he had been promised the job, and all of the sudden someone says, ‘You leave today.’ ” But Preet refused to quit. At 2:29 p.m. on March 11, he posted to his brand-new Twitter account: “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired.” When Bharara left his office for the last time, to the strains of a bagpiper hired for the occasion, television cameras broadcast his exit through a cordon of applauding prosecutors.

“By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like,” he tweeted after his firing, in what was widely interpreted as an arch hint about ongoing investigations. “My brother and I are two kids from Jersey, so we have some wiseguy in us,” Bharara said. “So it didn’t require a Ph.D. in social media.”

Over the succeeding months, as often happens on Twitter, Bharara has grown less guarded, more strident, warning that Trump is undermining the rule of law. “We go back and forth on this idea, that in normal times, to be the guy who’s bashing Obama or the guy who’s bashing George Bush — who wants to be that guy?” Bharara said. “These are extraordinary times. The percentage of the news being driven by the president and his statements and his policies, that impact directly on the wheelhouse of my expertise, is unbelievable.”

But in the weeks before the show’s launch, the Bhararas were still trying to figure out the right tone for the podcast. Preet was determined to do a show that addressed weighty legal subjects, like civil rights and sentencing reform. Vinit wanted to fit his brother into Cafe’s existing identity, which has been mainly devoted to political satire. The site’s most successful creation during the 2016 campaign was fictional pundit Carl Diggler, a parody of facile political analysts. (The young comedy writers behind the character went on to co-create the “dirtbag left” political podcast Chapo Trap House.) Vinit said Preet could speak to the same audience. “All those values and beliefs that unite this demographic in a way that it’s a community, that’s what he’s bringing,” he said. “And he has his way of being able to communicate this stuff in a surprisingly witty and entertaining manner.” Preet recently hired a former Justice Department speechwriter to expand Cafe’s coverage of serious issues. For now, though, the website features some odd juxtapositions, as Preet’s face keeps company with headlines like “Seven Other Horrible Times Ted Cruz Was Horny Online” and a new web series called Problem Solved With Rob Whisman, in which a sweaty-looking comedian tries to solve the world’s problems on an overhead projector.

And for all his political celebrity, Bharara wasn’t a professional conversationalist. In August, a month before Stay Tuned premiered, he went into the recording studio for a dry run. Henry Molofsky, one of Linsky’s colleagues, rehearsed the show’s opening segment, reading out practice audience questions. One of them concerned an assertion by one of Trump’s attorneys that Mueller could be fired if he crossed a “red line” by probing into his business dealings.

“Yeah, I don’t know what the red line means, this is not Syria,” Bharara replied.

Then, choosing his words carefully — “I’m speaking not from knowledge but experience” — he went on to outline what he saw as the probable scenario. When Mueller was appointed, he said, the Justice Department most likely put out a call to all the federal prosecutors around the country, saying that if they were investigating anything related to Trump, his finances, associates, or the election, it now belonged “under one roof” in the special counsel’s office. “So this idea,” he went on, “that Bob Mueller was put into office and is now on all sorts of detours and frolics, and expanding his purview because he wants to look at all these things that are beyond some nonsensical red line that the president unilaterally announces, is not necessarily the case.”

Where I was sitting, outside the recording booth, there was an appreciative murmur. Another producer radioed a request into Molofsky’s headphones: “Hey, will you ask him if we can keep the F-bombs in, because he gets really passionate, and it’s fun.”

“Ahh, you know, I don’t know,” Bharara said uneasily. “I’m not sure about that yet.”

Bharara knows many Trump opponents “are interested in one thing, and if you tweet about something else, it’s ‘There’s more important things than that thing you just tweeted about.’ ” They are following the news of Mueller’s investigation as an inevitable march toward impeachment. “The thing that bothers me — and we’ll probably talk about this on the show — is all these people that are dying to lock him up,” Bharara told me. “They think there’s a foolproof case, they don’t know anything about the law, they don’t know anything about the facts. There’s a rush to substitute one’s political preference for what law and justice requires. That was true of the people who hated Hillary last year; that is true of the people who hate Trump now. A lot of people are seeing this opportunity to remove someone who they don’t like politically through criminal legal means.”

Bharara is often critical of “hyperventilating” in the press over the Russia investigation. “There are a thousand journalists who are all looking for scoops, some of whom are reliable, some of whom not,” he said during the September taping, adding that reports that Manafort had been told he would soon be indicted sounded like “nonsense.” That’s just not how investigators usually play their cards, he said, though he stressed, “This is all speculation on my part.” He still talks like a prosecutor, cagey with his words.

“For years, he trained himself to be incredibly judicious with information and reveal nothing,” Linsky said. “Now, all of a sudden, the muscle you need is the exact opposite.” He has asked Bharara, when he hits those lines, to at least “tell me you can’t tell me.” The realization that he can’t say everything lends extra weight to the insights he does offer. Linsky happened to be working with Bharara on the day over the summer that news broke of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with some Russian emissaries in 2016. “It was just so meaningful to be able to go into a room and ask, ‘On a scale of one to ten, what’s going on here?’ ” Bharara told him the revelation scored a 6.5 on his smoking-gun scale.

Bharara can discern, perhaps as well as anyone now speaking publicly, where the mystery plot may be headed. But listeners tuning into his show for dramatic revelations are likely to be disappointed; Bharara is stubbornly resistant to allowing the show to become, as he puts it, “too Trump.” His first few shows featured friendly retrospective interviews with Democrats in exile, like Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff and CIA director, and Vanita Gupta, the head of the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division under President Obama. Some of his initial interviews hardly touched on Trump at all. In September, I watched him tape an interview with the outspoken federal judge Jed Rakoff, with whom he discussed the moral calculus of punishment. “What is cosmic justice?” Bharara asked.

“I don’t aspire to be a talk-show host. This is a thing that I’m doing, and we’ll see how it goes,” Bharara told me. Then he added, “I don’t know how much of an audience there is for moderate thoughtfulness from someone who used to have power.”

“You just gave us a tagline,” Vinit said, grinning. “Moderate thoughtfulness: Preet!” Bharara tried it again, in his most solemn, radio-ready voice.

“Moderate thoughtfulness … from a guy who used to have power.”

Vinit has far higher ambitions for his brother’s new media career. “When you’re building brands, you have to focus on what is it exactly that you’re going to be best at,” he told me at another point. “Why are the people going to wear the shirts and the hats? I can see through Preet why people would.”

He turned to address his brother. “Because you do have these folks who follow you and have that passion for what you stand for. And I think that would be great, for Cafe to take that from you, and for that to halo, and for us to build around it — this idea that we can do better. We should be thinking about these core values of justice, fairness, and equality. We should be thinking about young people and how do we do it in a way where it’s not preachy, it’s not political, it is universal, but we’re having fun with it. And I think if we do that right, I can see millions and millions of people wearing the Cafe hats and shirts.”

The resistance will be monetized.

*This article appears in the October 2, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

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Chris Christie goes after the “riffraff” in the Trump administration in a new excerpt from his memoir — Let Me Finish

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. …

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) … Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

Bloomberg speech at @NationalAction DC breakfast a concerted effort to prove his life has focused on issues important African-American community, touching on education, environmental justice, lessons from father, and - above all - gun violence

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.

Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.

The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.

More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.

Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.

“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”

Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …

In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history

GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ

Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”

“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …

Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”

An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis

A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.

“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”

Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.

On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.

On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.

“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”

Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.

“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”

1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.

2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).

4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

More comments from the Native American elder who was harassed by MAGA-clad teens on Friday in D.C.

[64-year-old Nathan] Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd. …

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.

“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said. …

Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement. A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.